Saturday, March 16, 2013

The old idiom states that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Which D&D gamers know isn’t true at all — beholders are hardly beautiful, and will negate your magic with their central eye, then zap you with their eyestalk rays. A new study of art through the ages suggests that a more accurate adage might be “beauty is in eye contact with the beholder.” Research shows that what we find beautiful — or at least engaging — are works of art that look back at us. Of course, we still wouldn’t recommend staring for very long into the eyes of Vigo, the Scourge of Carpathia.

The new study is rooted in a concept known as cognitive attraction, and it states that our neurological processes — our hardwired human brains — cause us to favor specific cultural traits more often than not. That plays out in our unconscious preferences, and has been used to explain our interests and desires in everything from religion to video games.

The study, published in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior and authored by Olivier Morin, goes on to state that the psychology of cognitive attraction led painters during the Renaissance to favor direct-gaze portraits over others. That is to say, paintings where the subjects are looking back at us — at you — instead of the profile, the three-quarters shot, or the looking-totally-somewhere-else style of painting that came before. Morin’s paper points out this cultural shift over the course of 16th century Europe didn’t take much into account for the subject’s age or sex. Whether the subject was young, old, male, female, pretty, or ugly — a young woman or Carpathian tyrant, it doesn’t matter – the direct-gaze approach was favored during the Renaissance. And here’s the clincher: It still is. Our museum collections and our coffee table books still demonstrate a preference for the creepy I’m-watching-you style of painting.

Morin posits that whenever cultural restrictions don’t override it, our neurological preference is the Mona Lisa approach in creating or observing. He even found a parallel artistic evolution in the poses of historical Korean paintings, showing that this isn’t a European trend but a human one.

Eye-to-eye contact, whether from a living person or a 2D, rendered image, are simply easier for us to identify — the same is true for infants — and are there more attractive to us. We’re just hardwired this way. Of course, “attractive” is not synonymous with “handsome.” It just means we have an easier time looking away from people not looking back at us.

Go ahead. Try it. Which one draws your eye more?

Although there's no historical proof that Whistler's mother WASN'T the "Sorrow of Moldovia."

Friday, March 15, 2013

Royal Collection exhibition in Edinburgh will show how accurate Renaissance polymath's sketches were

Leonardo da Vinci's sketch of a foetus in the womb, which will go on show alongside a 3D ultrasound. Photograph: The Royal Collection

Insights into the workings of the human body that Leonardo da Vinci could only obtain by dissecting scores of corpses and recording the results in exquisite drawings will be displayed for the first time beside modern 3D films, CT and MRI scans, which show how close the Renaissance genius got to the truth of what lies under the skin.

Some of the Leonardo drawings from the Royal Collection – which owns one of the greatest collections of his work in the world – have never been exhibited before in Britain, including the complete set of 18 sheets known as Anatomical Manuscript A, on which he crammed more than 240 drawings and some 13,000 words of notes in his unmistakable mirror-writing.

Leonardo was a polymath, renowned as a painter but also fascinated by science, mathematics, artillery, architecture, music, poetry, engineering and astronomy, among many other subjects. Martin Clayton, curator of the exhibition – which will open in the Queen's Gallery at Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh to coincide with the Edinburgh festival, and run on until mid-November – believes his work on anatomy could have transformed medical knowledge, but the results remained in his own notebooks until his death in 1519. He had intended to publish a major treatise but, like so much of his work, it was never completed as he was constantly distracted by new projects.

All the drawings had been imported into England by the 17th century, bound into an album which was probably bought by Charles II, and have been in the Royal Collection since at least 1690.

Some of the anatomical drawings were exhibited in the Queen's Gallery in London last year, but the Edinburgh show will be the first to compare Leonardo's results with scalpel and pen with the best results of modern technology.

Clayton said: "For the first time we will be displaying the artist's works alongside stunning examples of medical imaging, showing how the concerns and methods of the world's leading anatomists have changed little in 500 years, and how truly groundbreaking Leonardo's work was.

The exhibition will show how close Leonardo got in some of his last medical experiments to discovering the role of the beating heart in the circulation of the blood, a century before William Harvey worked it out.

In 1508 he dissected a 100-year-old man, and recorded accurately for the first time cirrhosis of the liver, and narrowing of the arteries. In the winter of 1510-11 he worked with the professor of anatomy dissecting 20 corpses in the medical school of Pavia, and covered his sheets of paper with multi-layered drawings from different angles of almost every bone in the human body including the first accurate depiction of the spine, and many of the major muscle groups.

One of the more famous drawings in the collection, of a baby in the womb – partly based on his dissection of a pregnant cow – will be displayed beside a 3D ultrasound scan of a foetus.

His drawings of a hand, beginning with the bones, adding the deep muscles of the palm and then the layers of tendons, will be displayed beside a film of a dissected hand in high definition 3D. His studies of the muscles of the shoulder and arm will also be compared with an animation of the same sequence, and a 3D film of a dissected shoulder which confirms the startling accuracy he achieved.

Saturday, March 2, 2013

If you ask Melbourne-based artist Daniel Agdag what he does, he’ll tell you that he makes things out of cardboard. However this statement hardly captures the absurd complexity and detail of his boxboard and PVA glue sculptures that push the limits of the medium. Agdag is an award-winning creator of stop-motion films and this new series of work, Sets for a Film I’ll Never Make, feature a number of his structural experiments which he refers to simply as “sketching with cardboard”. Miraculously, each work is created without detailed plans or drawings and are almost wholly improvised as he works. You can see these latest sculptures at Off the Kerb Gallery starting October 26, 2012 in Melbourne’s inner north suburb of Collingwood.

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welcome to my life

Being a painter is not a choice. It is not a chosen
profession. Painting is a compulsion. It is a need like breathing or eating. If
fact it regularly supersedes both. There is no choice in whether or not I will
paint only the when and often not even that. Away from the studio I think about
the canvas that sits there unfinished, calling to me, challenging me, maddening
me.